Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Ten Theses On Taxes And Democracy

An Amor Mundi Tax Day tradition:

One

Hostility to taxes
is commonplace among anarchists, as well as for right-wing "conservatives"
whose advocacy of "smaller" or "more limited" government might as well be anarchism, since always only advocating ever smaller, ever more limited
government without ever indicating what good government actually should be and alone
can accomplish is substantially equivalent to blanket anti-governmentality in principle.
Exploitation of discontent over taxes is also commonplace among
neoliberal/neoconservative right-wing politicians and thinkers who want
to ensure taxes subsidize primarily the fortunes of incumbent elites
through extractive-industrial-financial corporate-militarism backed by
complacent consumerism and organized violence. I for one do not want to
smash states, but to democratize them. And an understanding and
championing of taxes should be no less indispensable to the work of
democratization as its obfuscation and demonization is indispensable to
the work of anti-democratization.

Two

Taxes are not really the price
we pay for a civilized society -- in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s,
influential phrase -- for civilization is priceless. This is just to say
that commonwealth is not a private commodity but a public good.
Taxes are not, for example, fees for discrete services that might be
provided otherwise, nor are taxes a price for which there might be
discount alternatives. Perhaps the true spirit of Holmes' phrase is
captured best in a negative formulation: anti-tax zealots would appear
to believe that civilization is the only free lunch.

Three

Certainly
taxes are not theft, as anarchists of the right and the left are so pleased to
declare, since taxation is a precondition for the constitution and
ongoing intelligibility of the claim to ownership on which notions of theft
depend in the first place.

Four

Neither
should taxes be mischaracterized as forced contributions to what might
instead be charitable causes, since the basic rights secured through
taxation cannot be regarded as matters of charity else they are not
truly rights but mere favors bestowed by privileged elites.

Five

Taxes are not, however annoying they may seem, burdens on our freedom so much as essential enablers
of freedom. Taxes, government bonds, and public fees support the public investments maintaining
the legal, infrastructural, and administrative material conditions alone
within which political freedom can abide.

Six

Taxes
ameliorate undemocratic concentrations of wealth and authority to
secure sufficient equity among citizens of diverse fortune. The equity
valued by democracy ensures that the diversity also valued by democracy
does not disable the demanding and costly democratic processes
facilitating collective responsibility, expression, criticism,
problem-solving and the interminable reconciliation of the aspirations
of all the people with whom we share and contest the present world.

Seven

Taxes
pay for the maintenance of institutions providing nonviolent
alternatives for the adjudication of disputes. Taxes pay to secure basic
needs to ensure that the scene of consent to everyday association is
reliably informed and is non-duressed by the threat of deprivation,
inequity, or insecurity. And taxes pay for the accountable
administration of commons and public goods without which they are
inevitably violated and exploited for short-term profit-taking by
minorities to the cost and risk of majorities. Far from representing
quintessential state violence, taxes are the enabling condition of a
democratic state facilitating nonviolence.

Eight

Taxes
coupled to representation itself ("No Taxation Without Representation")
tie the maintenance of government as such -- an organization invested
with legitimate recourse to force with all the clear dangers inhering in
that state of affairs -- inextricably to public accountability and
democratic legitimacy.

Nine

Taxing
more those who profit more by their personal recourse to the shared
inheritance of human knowledge and culture, to the shared substance of
precarious environmental resources on which we all depend for our
survival and flourishing, and to the ongoing benefits of collaboratively
maintained infrastructure, institutions, norms, trust, legitimacy, and
security is not unfair in the least. Progressive taxation follows quite
simply from a recognition of the indisputable fact of our radical
inter-dependence as both productive and vulnerable beings in the world.
This same recognition, of course, is also the foundation for fairness.

Ten

Whenever
a right wing politician declares all government wasteful, criminal, or
corrupt you should pay close attention, because he is revealing his
intentions. Wherever government is meant to be of by and for the people,
to be anti-government always means to be against the great majority of
the people.